Prison guards not adequately protected

JWayne625 · November 24, 2004

MONTREAL (CP) - Federal prison guards, displaying a variety of homemade weapons seized from convicts, demanded better tools on Tuesday to protect themselves from some of Canada's most dangerous citizens.
"We're facing shanks, zip guns, picks, even attacks with syringes tainted with the AIDS (news - web sites) virus," said Pierre Mallette, a corrections officer at the Donnacona prison near Quebec City.

Until we start treating inmates like criminals again, instead of poor misunderstood mentally ill individual's we will continue to put lives in danger. Sure a small percentage of prisoners are mentally ill, but they make up a very small percentage of people in prisons and jails, and I agree this type of individual in many cases could eb better helped in a group home setting or in an institution. They are there because government's and social workers, have closed mental institutions in favour of community based services.

Jails and prison have been transformed from cells where every prisoner could be observed from one guard post, into a dormatory style facility where there are many blind areas where prisoners can do whatever without being observed. God forbid they be deprived of their privacy. Some have commjtted horrible atrocities on other human beings by for some reason our warped snese of justice bestows more right's on these low-lifes than it ever afforded to their victims. If this is the way our Charter reads, it needs to be changed immediately.Prisoners are now being treated as if they are all just misunderstood individuals and a bit of applied treatment is all that is needed to put them on the straight and narrow. Bleeding heart organization's like the John Howard Society, and Elizabeth Fry spend all of their waking hours lobbying for prisoner's rights, but the victims seem to have been forgotten in the march to insure that criminal's rights are not violated. Things have gotten so lax that we are now putting guard's lives in danger, and that has to change.

We need to go back to referring to these individuals as what they are, criminals, and removing right's instead of giving them. If they can't conform to the laws of society, why do they deserve rights? Most are where they are because they made a concious choice to break the law. They certainly didn't plan on getting caught, in fact if you have had a chance to talk to some of them as I did for over 10 years, they will tell you that they got caught because they were careless, but, next time, " they will be more careful, and those stupid Pigs won't catch them." Their only remorse is not for their victims, it is for themselves, and the fact that they got caught.

Argus · November 25, 2004

Jails and prison have been transformed from cells where every prisoner could be observed from one guard post, into a dormatory style facility where there are many blind areas where prisoners can do whatever without being observed. God forbid they be deprived of their privacy. Some have commjtted horrible atrocities on other human beings by for some reason our warped snese of justice bestows more right's on these low-lifes than it ever afforded to their victims.

Who is this "we" you're talking about? The people treating prisoners gently are the bleeding heart, brainless idiots in charge of our prison system, dishonest, dispicable people who are so blinded by their own prejudices and ignorance they couldn't run a corner store properly. The only way things are going to change is to get in there and fire Lucie McClung, the idiot in charge, a woman who never met a prisoner she couldn't hug, and about the first six layers of senior management, as well as all prison wardens, and replace them with people who know what their job is supposed to be. Unfortunately, that's not likely to happen. Corrections Canada, as well as the National Parole Board, is littered with political appointees who owe their jobs to their connections within the Liberal Party.

JWayne625 · November 28, 2004

Whoa, I'm on your side. And you're right it is not likely to happen since prisons are now being run by, as Prof. Paul Gendron put it MBA's who have no idea what a prison is supposed to do. They concern themselves with making sure the program stays within certain financial constraints, and if that means closing prisons and laying off guards, then so be it. These are the same types they are hiring now to run hospitals. They could care less what the institution they are running is supposed to accomplish, because they concern themselves with only the bottom line.